Navigating The Shifts In Computing Infrastructure Markets

Important trends are surfacing in computing infrastructure markets that will cause vendor strategists to take a fresh look at new buyer behavior, shifts in business models, and adoption of emerging technologies. Forrester's Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2010, clearly shows that buyers of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services in end user companies are split into two distinct segments: informal and formal. Informal buyers are meeting business needs for new-style workloads (typically session and compute-intensive apps), while formal IaaS cloud buyers are driven by a conservative, IT outsourcing-style approach for transaction apps that leads them to focus most on expanding their virtualization and automation capabilities in pursuit of the internal cloud ideal. Overall, we learned that end user buyers are increasing their influence on infrastructure spend relative to IT in cloud IaaS and in handhelds, that buyers are responding to specific cloud storage solutions and not generic cloud storage offerings, and that the diversity of infrastructure environments is increasing in servers and in client devices.